Course co-directors: Marija Mandić (University of Belgrade) and Olesia Marković (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy)
The course aims to critically rethink the Balkans as a borderland and to challenge simplistic readings of its history and culture. Some of the biggest empires and political blocks bordered each other in the Balkans, like the Romans & the Byzantines, Habsburgs and the Ottomans, or Eastern and Western Block during the Cold War, resulting in the centuries-long encounter between Christian (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant), Jewish, and Islamic tradition. Their various legacies can still be traced in its demographic composition, institutions, and cultural fabric, but also in recent wartime violence, ethnic engineering, post-Cold War global recomposition, and current mass migration movements. The course tracks current cultural, economic, and social tendencies as well as the changing identities of its inhabitants toward their contemporary bid for European integration, with a special focus on multidimensional relations between borders and narratives. It thus has relevance far beyond this region and provides valuable lessons about the politics of identity, war, and ethnic conflict as well as postwar reconstruction, contemporary political history, and international relations in the borderlands worldwide.